Grants

COERLL (previously the Texas Language Technology Center) has received grants from the Department of Education and other granting agencies for projects related to language education and technology.

SpinTX: From Corpus to Classroom

Longhorn Innovation Fund for Technology (LIFT), The University of Texas at Austin

COERLL's Spanish in Texas Corpus (SpinTX) project was selected to receive funding from the Longhorn Innovation Fund for Technology (LIFT) for the grant period September 1, 2012 – August 31, 2013. The Spanish in Texas project created a spoken corpus of authentic Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English speech samples from diverse populations across Texas. The focus of the grant project was to help educators exploit the videos in the SpinTX corpus to customize materials for the teaching of Spanish at all educational levels.

The specific objectives of the Corpus-to-Classsroom project were:

to develop a pedagogically friendly interface for the video corpus;

to involve teachers and learners, via crowd-sourcing, social networking, and workshops, in the development of open educational resources (OER);

and to develop a model for using open source tools and a pedagogical interface that can be adapted for any language corpus.

Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning

Language Resource Centers, U.S. Department of Education

COERLL was established as a Title VI National Foreign Language Resource Center (LRC) in 2010, and received a new four-year grant in 2014 and 2018. For more information, see the pages About COERLL and read about the 15 other Title VI LRCs.

The Texas Language Technology Textbook Initiative

Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education

This two-year award of $263,000 from the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) was to develop a sustainable publishing model for foreign language instructional materials to combat the rising costs of textbooks.

For this project, TLTC (now COERLL) joined open source technology with print-on-demand publishing to radically lower textbook prices. Besides price reductions, print on demand publishing holds many benefits, such as inventory tracking and little or no waste from unsold products. The goal was to create an online French textbook that will be free of charge and free of copyright and licensing restrictions. A print-on-demand version is available for a fraction of the cost compared to most commercially published textbooks. In addition, the collaboratively published textbook allows students and instructors to customize materials by editing existing content or by adding their own content.

The Texas Language Technology Open Access Initiative (TLTOAI)

Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education

In the Fall of 2007 TLTC (now COERLL), in collaboration with Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS), was awarded a three-year $540,000 FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) grant to produce open access foreign language instructional resources. Open-access resources are digital scholarly works accessible online, free of charge. The TLTC open access initiative focused on the development, production, dissemination, and evaluation of six current TLTC multimedia resources: Aswaat Arabiyya, Alkitaab Textbook, Deutsch im Blick, Persian Online, Radio Arlecchino, and Tá Falado. UT scholars and TLTC technical staff will build on the model of instructional technology development successfully implemented in Français interactif, UT's highly successful online first-year French curriculum. The development model rests on rigorous and ongoing formative evaluation, inclusion of students as evaluators and co-creators, and an emphasis on high production values and accessibility.

Foreign Language Teaching Methods

In 2009, TLTC (now COERLL) was awarded a Professional Development Modules grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The grant provides funding to eligible higher education institutions to create online professional development about the most effective strategies or "best practices" for improving both teaching and learning. The grant focused on the production of the Foreign Language Teaching Methods website, a complete video-based teaching methods course for foreign language teachers.